2014-05-11: Volcanic Rage

[Nosy Neighbordroid]

Discussion thread for Volcanic Rage

[smilingface]

epic fail tech bubble

I can totally understand Jordans "wtf, what have I done?" mentallity. But she has to grow up. It's not easy to be as smart as she is.
Maybe Craig learns to understand what he just did (or gets told by Seth) and uses stupid comments to nag Jordan
Yet I kinda doubt that would happen. Why using brains when you just can punch your problems to go away (most of the time).

[Immanio]

I can't believe it either, Jordan.

[hkmaly]

Meanwhile, the idea about cold fusion freezing something is totally untrue. Cold fusion is called cold because it's done at lower temperatures that normal fusion. Not only it would STILL make the volcano hotter even if it would be room temperature, the definition says "room temperature or near": as normal fusion happens in temperatures in millions of degrees, fusion happening in temperature around 3000 degrees (hotter than most volcanos) would be still considered COLD.

I suppose someone already told J.J. Abrams.

[lyze]

Craig has watched one too many Syfy channel presents movies. Seems lots of them solve the problem with explosions.

On note of syfy channel movies, anyone seen the one with the basilisk? I shit you not, in that one the basilisk used a form of 'organic cold fusion' venom it spit out to turn its victims to stone. At one point the protagnist got sprayed in the face and washed the fusion out of his eyes with ordinary tap water. Mmm, delicious, delicious b movie cheese...

[Baeraad]

Oh, shush, Jordan. If he'd been any smarter, he wouldn't have put anything in your body, because he wouldn't have fallen for the whole "er... sorry, my, uhm... dad isn't here right now. Yes, that's it, my dad! Who's a your archnemesis! Unlike me, who's definitely not!" bit in the first place.

[Graybeard]

Meanwhile, the idea about cold fusion freezing something is totally untrue. Cold fusion is called cold because it's done at lower temperatures that normal fusion. Not only it would STILL make the volcano hotter even if it would be room temperature, the definition says "room temperature or near": as normal fusion happens in temperatures in millions of degrees, fusion happening in temperature around 3000 degrees (hotter than most volcanos) would be still considered COLD.

Weirdly enough, I spent a non-trivial part of my career working on cold fusion (mainly debunking it -- my real-life name appears in some books describing the debunking of cold fusion, although I will not at this time say where), and let me reassure you: what Craig is saying here is far from the nuttiest idea that otherwise nominally intelligent people had on the subject. Quite the contrary, this one is art imitating life, at least if you accept the superhero and archvillain overlay.

[Anthony]

let me reassure you: what Craig is saying here is far from the nuttiest idea that otherwise nominally intelligent people had on the subject.

Curious how we rank the nuttiness of ideas -- is an incomprehensible idea more or less nutty than one that's easy to understand and spectacularly wrong? How about being wrong about things that are within the range of normal experience, vs being wrong about things that require at least a moderate level of science training to understand? Most of the real cold fusion nuttery I've seen has been either incomprehensible, or a result of misunderstanding things that are at least somewhat difficult to understand.

[smilingface]

let me reassure you: what Craig is saying here is far from the nuttiest idea that otherwise nominally intelligent people had on the subject.

Curious how we rank the nuttiness of ideas -- is an incomprehensible idea more or less nutty than one that's easy to understand and spectacularly wrong? How about being wrong about things that are within the range of normal experience, vs being wrong about things that require at least a moderate level of science training to understand? Most of the real cold fusion nuttery I've seen has been either incomprehensible, or a result of misunderstanding things that are at least somewhat difficult to understand.

Scale of nuttiness? Just let me get my gizmo-meter and let me set it from milli-doom to milli-bonkers.

[Forrest]

Wasn't there some movie about "cold fusion" (possibly by that title?) from the 90s where some kind of "cold fusion" reactor meltdown basically freeze-exploded a city (or a city block or something). Where by "freeze-exploded" I mean there was something like an explosion that happened, except instead of a fireball causing everything in its radius to go up in flames, it caused everything to freeze instead.

Some googling suggests I may be thinking of "Chain Reaction", and reading the synopsis I don't see anything about a freeze-explosion in there. Maybe I'm just misremembering some sort of blue-energy-wave special effect and the mention of "cold fusion" as being some kind of freeze-bomb?